XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit
A set of command line utilities to transform, query, validate, and edit
XML documents — the way grep, sed, and awk
work on plain text.
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News
7 September 2026
The first release from the project's new home on GitHub, and the first in over a
decade. It's primarily a modernization and infrastructure release.
- Windows binaries — self-contained, statically linked builds
for x86_64 and arm64, published as release assets (a first for the
project).
- libxml2 / libxslt modernization — builds cleanly against
libxml2 2.6.27 through 2.15.3 (and git
HEAD), and is ready for
libxml2 3.0.
- Bug fixes across the
ed and sel
subcommands, stdin handling, and memory safety.
- Fuzzing — a new ASan/UBSan mutation-fuzzing harness, which
found and fixed several memory-safety bugs in
ed, sel and
depyx.
- Broad CI — a GitHub Actions matrix spanning many libxml2
versions, gcc/clang, Linux x86-64/aarch64, macOS, the BSDs, Solaris/illumos and
musl.
- Full history archived — the complete SourceForge release
history (0.0.1–1.6.1) is now mirrored as GitHub Releases.
Full release notes and downloads →
26 July 2026
A release candidate published for testing ahead of the final 1.7.0.
25 July 2026
New project website
XMLStarlet has a new website at
xmlstarlet.github.io, replacing the old
SourceForge site. It is built and deployed from
GitHub, with the User's
Guide generated directly from the project source so it stays in step with each release.
9 August 2014
Handle Unicode arguments under Windows. No difference for non-Windows platforms.
13 June 2014
Dropped the "helpful" namespace message and updated the user guide. Added a
--stop option to val and a global --no-doc-namespace
option. The make install target now succeeds even when the docs aren't
built.
7 July 2013
Fixed a segfault on a non-existent pyx file and fixed unescaping of entities
straddling a 4K byte boundary. Added hex entity unescaping (&#xXX;), a
global quiet option, empty-element creation in ed, and use of default
attribute values in sel.
28 November 2009
New Windows binary for XMLStarlet 1.0.1
A recompiled Windows binary, built against libxml2-2.7.6 and libxslt-1.1.26.
16 March 2005
Maintenance release of the command line XML toolkit.
29 January 2005
The first stable release.
18 September 2004
Development release of the toolkit.
1 July 2004
FreeBSD port available
XMLStarlet became available as a FreeBSD port (textproc/xmlstarlet).
Earlier announcements (back to the first release in May 2003) are
preserved in the SourceForge news
archive. XMLStarlet is now developed on
GitHub — bug reports and pull
requests are welcome on the
issue tracker.
